Slackin' Online for all to see

Archive for the 'Topslakr' Category

I’ve been a happy iTunes Match user since the service was introduced. I have a large music collection and I don’t always want to dedicate the required amount of iPhone and computer storage to keeping it available all the time on all my devices. iTunes Match lets Apple deal with storing the whole thing and allows me to just download what I want on a given device or stream music I own to any device I’d like. It’s been $25/year well spent.

That being said, with streaming music plans taking over the market, I can’t imagine Apple’s going to want to offer this service forever, plus I prefer to self-host as much of my digital needs as possible. Finding a way to replicate these features though has proven a bit tough. There were a few projects that would allow me to stream my music but I don’t want to use up my whole data plan streaming songs over and over again or have my music drop out every time I’m in a dead zone. Thankfully, I found Libresonic, which in concert with an app on my iPhone checks a lot of these boxes. Read more...(818 words, estimated 3:16 mins reading time)

I remember the first time I saw a moment that I knew I had to photograph. I wonder if other photographers are the same.

I was in Maine, spending a weekend with a friend at his lake side cabin. I woke up on a cool late autumn morning and the whole lake was covered in rising mist. The water was much warmer than the cool dry air and up came the moisture.

My only camera was a 3 megapixel ‘Kodak Easy Share’ I had gotten for Christmas a few years before. This was turn of the century, inexpensive, pocket camera technology at its most average. It was a fine snapshot camera, and I was glad to have received it as a gift, but I never expected that misty lake would impact my life to such a degree.

After that trip, I did a bit of research and bought myself a little Canon point and shoot camera. It was 8 mega pixels and had a bit of zoom ability built-in. I fully expected to love that camera and never need to upgrade again. In the end though, I found it very frustrating. Read more...(692 words, 1 image, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)

I use rsnapshot, on Centos 7, to manage the vast majority of my backups across a myriad of linux servers both within my network and across the globe. I’ve never blogged about the entirety of that process, but I wanted to post a quick note about how I use rsnapshot to also backup the configuration of my router.

Until recently, I had been using this process to backup my pfSense routers. With my switch to OPNsense though, I was pleased to see the process is the same.

Basically, we just need to make a copy of a single folder on the machine, ‘/conf’, which is located right off of the root on both pfSense an OpnSense.

Step one is to make sure you have a user setup on the router that can connect over SSH. For OpnSense you need to log into the web portal and navigate to System -> Settings -> Administration. Check the box to ‘Enable Secure Shell’ and ‘Permit Password login’. (We’ll disable password logins in a moment) Read more...(548 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)

As often happens with computers of all types, log files build up over time. Generally speaking, the operating system will rotate these logs, which means it breaks them up into chunks, but it isn’t usually set to remove the old chunks. Over time, those log files can start to add up.

I am giving some thought to changing the provider of the VPS that hosts this web page, since performance is not consistent and the VPS is not very reliable, and I was curious to know how much disk space I needed for the system to run well. After doing some light clean up on the system I did a check to see where on the disk I was using the most space.

Using the following command, I did a search to find out which folders contained the most data:

I’ve been using Raspberry Pi computers for several years. A few months ago the Raspberry Pi B I had hooked up to my TV and running OpenElec, stopped working. The Pi was locked up and then wouldn’t reboot when I pulled the power cord.

It’s an original B model, with just two USB ports, so I didn’t think much of it. I prepped and put in place a replacement Pi, also running OpenElec, and threw the Pi into a drawer for further inspection..later. I got 4 years faithful service from a $35 computer so I wasn’t complaining.

Some weeks later, I had an idea that I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi for so I grabbed the questionable unit and got to work.

My standard way to prep a Pi is to use raspbian-ua-netinst (https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst/). It doesn’t require a huge download, and it doesn’t automatically install a GUI and a bunch of software I don’t want. Read more...(650 words, estimated 2:36 mins reading time)